11 ms·

New Tab Experiments

66 points by RougeFemme 12y ago

mantrax5 12y ago
"That's not who we are at Mozilla". That's Mozilla talking about a Mozilla decision. Do you people suffer split personality or something? When a company changes its mind about such things it's the worst of both worlds: you get all the negative PR, none of the benefits, and on top of that it makes Mozilla management look like a bunch of indecisive amateurs who have no strategy, rhyme or reasons behind their actions. A company that decides to have sponsored new tab links and then decides it's not "who we are" might decide something completely random tomorrow. You can't rely on there being consistency, because apparently they're not sure who they are. Mozilla fears their users now. They fear them. That's not a good thing, because it means Mozilla doesn't have the credibility to do what's good for their users and for Mozilla if users might perceive their actions as bad. But popular actions and good actions don't always overlap. I wish it was that easy. The word "populism" wouldn't be a bad thing.
- gluxon 12y ago
  At the same time, you have to acknowledge that Mozilla suffered a huge backlash from its user base when Australis was landed on release. For the exact opposite reason you're describing. I'm not sure if these events are related, but Firefox developers have been talking about this decision in the mailing list for a while. This doesn't come to me as a surprise.
  - daleharvey 12y ago
    I wouldnt call the Australis reaction a backlash, in fact I believe it was very positive considering it was a big change. If your point was that there was and will always be people who protest against a change, then yup.
    - Pacabel 12y ago
      What is it that makes you think that the reception of Australis was "very positive"? I'd consider the reception of a software product update to merely be "positive" if there was generally praise, basically no negativity at all, and people expressing that they are now significantly better off. "Very positive" would involve no negativity, and complete and total jubilation from users. This is extremely rare. A lot of people are not happy about Australis, and justifiably so. While Firefox has been imitating Chrome the past few years, Australis sealed the deal and made them nearly identical in the most critical ways. The only mitigating factor is that there really isn't a viable alternative to either Chrome or Firefox these days. Opera has basically become Chrome, and Safari obviously has very similar roots. IE is engaging in the same imitation of Chrome. Both IE and Safari suffer from a lack of portability, too. Many Firefox users are extremely disappointed with Australis, but they have no recourse. Switching browsers isn't really an option. And we wouldn't be in this position had Mozilla listened to all of the past feedback they've been given, so giving more feedback is probably a pointless exercise. So they suck it up, as best they can. Australis was a debacle, at best. I think you're deceiving yourself, and people not familiar with the situation, to suggest otherwise.
      - Silhouette 12y ago
        I wonder how long it will be before Mozilla are in real danger of losing control of the browser they call Firefox, if they continue on their recent trajectory. We're talking about Open Source here, so it is always possible to fork it under different branding, and a few groups already have for one reason or another. Of course, in reality, forking and then establishing the fork as a mainstream replacement that aligns more closely with the traditional advantages of Firefox would be a huge undertaking. For any new browser to gain traction outside of geek communities would surely require both a substantial user base and substantial support from the development community. But it's been done before, even for large and high profile projects, when the existing corporate stewardship wasn't getting the job done: the LibreOffice/OpenOffice split is the first example that comes to mind. If I were this week's CEO at Mozilla, I would consider a mainstream fork to be at least a plausible threat by now.
        Pacabel 12y ago
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  > Do you people suffer split personality or something? I think it was Marissa Meyer who said, "Companies don't do things. People do things." Companies are just collections of people grouped together under some sort of legal structure. It doesn't mean that they actually all act as if they were one monolithic entity. Even at relatively small companies, it's not unusual for one team to have the authority to make a decision that later gets contradicted or reversed either higher up the chain, or in a different part of the organization. I don't know if this is better or worse than average at Mozilla, but it's certainly present to at least some extent in any company of (almost) any size.
  - Osmose 12y ago
    > I don't know if this is better or worse than average at Mozilla, It's less about contradiction (which implies a final decision was made and then reversed) and more about being painfully open. Other companies may also have lots of instances where there's internal disagreement on things, but when your standard form of communication is mailing lists, IRC, and blog posts, it's a lot harder to maintain the façade of a unified mind.
    - mantrax5 12y ago
      You're exactly right. This would be like a person who is unable to lead internal dialog, and everything they think, they say out loud.
  - mantrax5 12y ago
    A well run company acts as one person. That's what a brand means. For good or bad, in the mind of people companies are allocated as a "person". We give personal characteristics to brands, so we value companies that act predictably, have certain well-known values and are consistent with their own values. It's the utmost responsibility even if your CEO changes every month, that the next CEO ensure continuity in spirit and operation of a company. After all, sure, companies don't do things, people do. But also people don't do things, brain cells do things. When a person is acting erratic and inconsistent, you don't talk about their internal brain cell conflicts, you see a problem at the person level. Same way erratically behaving brands & companies will be written off, because they don't stand for anything and have no reliable characteristics. Companies that act inconsistently are said to have "left hand doesn't know what right hand does" problem. It's not a feature, it's a bug. It's no coincidence the analogy is to that with the mind of a single person. You may be collection of brain parts, but for proper operations it's crucial you operate self-consistently. Companies are no different.
- azakai 12y ago
  > Do you people suffer split personality or something? There are downsides to doing design and development in the open, sometimes looking that way is one of them. But the benefits are worth it.
- danso 12y ago
  > "That's not who we are at Mozilla". That's Mozilla talking about a Mozilla decision. Do you people suffer split personality or something? Wow, this here is a textbook case of out-of-context quoting...even in a post that takes 30 seconds to read. Here's the context that the parent comment has completely failed to read: > A lot of our community found the language hard to decipher, and worried that we were going to turn Firefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit. > > That’s not going to happen. That’s not who we are at Mozilla. "That's not going to happen. That’s not who we are at Mozilla" - refers to the perceived fear that: "we were going to turn Firefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit". - NOT to an actual decision/policy that the Mozilla team is ostensibly standing behind. I don't necessarily disagree with the rest of your rant, but the fact that you so terribly misquoted the OP doesn't lend your argument much credence.
  - randallsquared 12y ago
    The grandparent comment was quietly asserting that the "perceived fear" was actually Mozilla's plan, and that they reversed course. I must admit, while I'd never really thought about Mozilla as an organization much before, the last month or two has prompted some thought about it, and this sort of "We're doing A. <time passes> No, wait, there's a perceived fear that we'll do A, but that's not who we are; we're doing B." seems like a good model of what they're doing lately. This saddens me, since I mostly use Firefox these days. :/
    - jasonlotito 12y ago
      > The grandparent comment was quietly asserting that the "perceived fear" was actually Mozilla's plan, and that they reversed course. Except nothing in the original announcement came close to the perceived fear. Essentially, people were extrapolating in such a way that this[0] comes to mine. [0] http://xkcd.com/605/ http://xkcd.com/605/
daleharvey 12y ago
I think this is both good and bad I love the fact that at Mozilla we listen to community input and make decisions that we feel are in the best interests of the user, I dont feel like I work at a company at Mozilla, I feel like I work with a community. But at the same time, a lot of the broader community are (rightly) cynical and when something like this is proposed it causes a minor uproar, Its also hard to filter out what is the vocal minority between a genuine concern, I have no doubt that it would have been implemented in a responsible way that benefited everyone involved, so I think this may be a bit of a missed opportunity, but onwards and upwards.
Osmose 12y ago
This article is an interpretation of https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2014/05/09/new-tab-experiments/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2014/05/09/new-tab-e... and I'm not sure it's the correct interpretation. My personal opinion (which might be wrong!) is that jonnath is trying to reassure people that 'Directory Tiles' is not about slapping random ads on the newtab page, and is not going to just ride the trains to release. They're going to stew in the Nightly channel for a while while we iterate on them and figure out how to make them useful to users. What I don't see is an assertion that the final feature won't involve some form of revenue. There's been no final declaration, but my understanding was that the suggested system involved choosing sites that are useful to our users, and then going to those sites and discussing payment for the placement, rather than letting sites come and pay us to be put on the page. This is very similar to what we do with the search box: we choose Google as the default because we think they're the best default for the users, not because they got to us first or paid us the most[1]. If you want more details about the implementation that's going to land on Nightly, check out the tracker bug for the feature and the dependent bugs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=973273 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=973273 (And remember kids, Bugzilla is for input on the implementation, discussion about the feature itself goes on a mailing list like firefox-dev[2]). [1]: Granted, if we choose Google and Google said "Hah, no money for you" then we'd probably go to another provider because we have employees to pay, but this becomes a more important distinction if, say, Bing wanted to pay us more than Google. [2]: https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev Disclaimer: I'm a webdev for Mozilla, and can't speak for the people actually working on Directory Tiles, only as someone who knows how to navigate Mozilla's public information.
- anon1385 12y ago
  >This is very similar to what we do with the search box: we choose Google as the default because we think they're the best default for the users, not because they got to us first or paid us the most Is there a public record of this discussion? I'm kind of curious if anybody brought up the idea that not having your searches tracked by an ad network would be best for the users. Unfortunately that leads to the conclusion that the default search should be DDG (or similar) and I doubt they could afford to pay you enough to keep Mozilla running. Call me cynical but I'm not sure I believe that anybody in the room was going to take that suggestion seriously when it meant their paycheque was on the line. I can accept the argument that Google is a better search engine right now so the tracking is 'worth it' for most users (although that does seem to conflict heavily with Principle 4 of the Mozilla Manifesto: Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional). What happens if DGG catches up enough to be functionally equivalent for most people? Do Mozilla engineers collectively fall on their swords and lose their jobs to improve the privacy of the internet for most users? Or do we have to engage in 'lesser of two evils' style mental gymnastics about the world being better if Firefox is well funded?
huhtenberg 12y ago
> A lot of our community found the language hard to decipher There is something rotten in the Mozilla stewardship. First they come with an idea that clearly goes against their users best interests. Then they actively try to disguise it and sell it as something that people really truly want, but are just dumb enough not to realize and appreciate. They still get an earful. And now they don't have chops to simply say that the idea was bad and it was written off. Instead there's this masterpiece of weasel wording that effectively puts blame on the users for killing a perfectly good idea. What the f#ck.
- Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago
  Their plan seemed fine to me. In fact, it was for the benefit of their users - everyone wins if Mozilla is funded and decoupled from Google. The ads were unintrusive, and made sense in context. It was just populating something that was replaced over time with info from your own browsing habits.
  - huhtenberg 12y ago
    It's not the idea to put the ads in. It's the fake pretense of doing that for the sake of users. Just re-read the original announcement [0]. It is so disingenuous, it hurts. Then see the line I quoted above. It got the exact same problem - it's disingenuous. The issues with the announcement were not with the language. [0] https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publisher-transformation-with-users-at-the-center/ https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publish...
    - kolme 12y ago
      They can be really useful to new users with no or little experience. From what I've seen, when people use the web for the first times, they "don't know where to go". They don't have surfing habits yet and they're completely overwhelmed by so much to choose from. If you offer people a handful of useful/informative/fun sites, it'll be much easier for them to pick something and get going. If this is implemented carefully (and I think Mozilla is putting a lot of though into it) this could really be a win-win-win situation for Mozilla, the users and the advertisers. Also note that chances are that you never see those ads because Firefox will continue showing you the sites you visit often.
tom_jones 12y ago
I thought this would be about the new mobile version, which unlike the prior "upgrade" is actually an upgrade. The prior mobile version ruined what was a great program. Hopefully that they're moving in the right direction with mobile will mean the desktop version will improve too.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
olegp 12y ago
Since we are on the topic of experimenting with the FF new tab page, it would be great to get the feedback of the HN community on this add-on that we've been working on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/starthq/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/starthq/ StartHQ replaces the new tab page with one that you can fully customize, giving you quick access to commonly used functionality using "deep links", as well as the ability to search inside your cloud services, like Greplin did back in the day. We also have an API so you can add search support to the services we don't support or internal apps used within your organization. More info here: https://starthq.com/features https://starthq.com/features
- chmod775 12y ago
  I think you guys sent me some mail when you added Volafile. It seemed very impersonal and automated to me, which is likely what you're doing. The other reason I pretty much ignored it was that the site didn't really appear 'curated' to me, just filled with stuff a crawler would've found out about me. Off the top of the head I have three ideas that might help: - Maybe make it possible for users (not webmasters) to edit information about pages or at least let them leave some feedback. - Send personalized mails to webmasters, to give them some incentive to actually help you pad the little information you have about their sites. Or even better let me just reply to your mail with a short description of my site and directly put that on Volafile's/Whatever's profile. That would basically take away all of the friction I'd have to endure while 'claiming' my profile. Replying to a mail isn't hard and you could be pretty sure it belongs to the rightful owner. - Just pull some reviews off other sites, like Google does with reviews for restaurants (only the first few lines with a link to full review) Use these suggestions however you like, they're just my few cents but they might help to pad the little content you have on each page with something more useful to the user. Currently stuff like this: https://starthq.com/apps/volafile-io https://starthq.com/apps/volafile-io looks empty and cheap to me, like something created by a machine. Not many people will be intent to discover more stuff on your page if the information they'll get is so little with each click. Even I, who wanted to discover 'alternatives' to my own service got bored after a few clicks. I didn't feel like I was finding out anything useful about the suggested alternatives and related services. Plus you don't seem to refresh the 'stars' very often. Volafile doesn't have a lot WoT ratings, but they don't seem to warrant 1 star. Why don't you let your users rate service by clicking on the stars? It works well for most other online 'market places'. I actually thought the stars would be clickable at first. Looking at some other services I don't think the 'stars' they have make sense at all. Most have 1 star throughout the bank and others have 4 times 1 star and one 5 star 'gauge'. They look pretty random and only confuse. Maybe you should try to work out better conditions on when to display them. Services with not enough data points available seem to get 1 star by default, maybe just gray them all out? Okay that's all I noticed. Maybe you should take my opinions with a grain of salt as I'm not really your average user, but I know how valuable feedback can be to small websites (running one myself, unsurprisingly) Edit: I can't seem to claim Volafile's profile. Just takes me to some launcher.
doe88 12y ago
That obtuse language still scares me, I think it says a lot that the word ads is not written a single time in this blog post and he seems to use the word logos instead.
ambrop7 12y ago
Why not spend all that time that goes into making changes to the UI on actual functionality, like multi-process, sandbox, faster WebGL?
- vfclists 12y ago
  Doesn't that work need to be funded somehow?
lucb1e 12y ago
> New Tab Experiments Hey, that's not the title I upvoted
melloclello 12y ago
I like my new tab to be empty. Because it's a new tab.
blueskin_ 12y ago
What I find bad is this: "particularly for fresh installs of Firefox, where we don’t yet have any recommendations to make from your history" Does this mean they are going to be scraping people's history to find 'suggestions'? If so, time for me to move to pale moon.

66 points by RougeFemme 12y ago

"That's not who we are at Mozilla". That's Mozilla talking about a Mozilla decision. Do you people suffer split personality or something? When a company changes its mind about such things it's the worst of both worlds: you get all the negative PR, none of the benefits, and on top of that it makes Mozilla management look like a bunch of indecisive amateurs who have no strategy, rhyme or reasons behind their actions. A company that decides to have sponsored new tab links and then decides it's not "who we are" might decide something completely random tomorrow. You can't rely on there being consistency, because apparently they're not sure who they are. Mozilla fears their users now. They fear them. That's not a good thing, because it means Mozilla doesn't have the credibility to do what's good for their users and for Mozilla if users might perceive their actions as bad. But popular actions and good actions don't always overlap. I wish it was that easy. The word "populism" wouldn't be a bad thing.

gluxon 12y ago
At the same time, you have to acknowledge that Mozilla suffered a huge backlash from its user base when Australis was landed on release. For the exact opposite reason you're describing. I'm not sure if these events are related, but Firefox developers have been talking about this decision in the mailing list for a while. This doesn't come to me as a surprise.
- daleharvey 12y ago
  I wouldnt call the Australis reaction a backlash, in fact I believe it was very positive considering it was a big change. If your point was that there was and will always be people who protest against a change, then yup.
  - Pacabel 12y ago
    What is it that makes you think that the reception of Australis was "very positive"? I'd consider the reception of a software product update to merely be "positive" if there was generally praise, basically no negativity at all, and people expressing that they are now significantly better off. "Very positive" would involve no negativity, and complete and total jubilation from users. This is extremely rare. A lot of people are not happy about Australis, and justifiably so. While Firefox has been imitating Chrome the past few years, Australis sealed the deal and made them nearly identical in the most critical ways. The only mitigating factor is that there really isn't a viable alternative to either Chrome or Firefox these days. Opera has basically become Chrome, and Safari obviously has very similar roots. IE is engaging in the same imitation of Chrome. Both IE and Safari suffer from a lack of portability, too. Many Firefox users are extremely disappointed with Australis, but they have no recourse. Switching browsers isn't really an option. And we wouldn't be in this position had Mozilla listened to all of the past feedback they've been given, so giving more feedback is probably a pointless exercise. So they suck it up, as best they can. Australis was a debacle, at best. I think you're deceiving yourself, and people not familiar with the situation, to suggest otherwise.
    - Silhouette 12y ago
      I wonder how long it will be before Mozilla are in real danger of losing control of the browser they call Firefox, if they continue on their recent trajectory. We're talking about Open Source here, so it is always possible to fork it under different branding, and a few groups already have for one reason or another. Of course, in reality, forking and then establishing the fork as a mainstream replacement that aligns more closely with the traditional advantages of Firefox would be a huge undertaking. For any new browser to gain traction outside of geek communities would surely require both a substantial user base and substantial support from the development community. But it's been done before, even for large and high profile projects, when the existing corporate stewardship wasn't getting the job done: the LibreOffice/OpenOffice split is the first example that comes to mind. If I were this week's CEO at Mozilla, I would consider a mainstream fork to be at least a plausible threat by now.
      - Pacabel 12y ago
chimeracoder 12y ago
> Do you people suffer split personality or something? I think it was Marissa Meyer who said, "Companies don't do things. People do things." Companies are just collections of people grouped together under some sort of legal structure. It doesn't mean that they actually all act as if they were one monolithic entity. Even at relatively small companies, it's not unusual for one team to have the authority to make a decision that later gets contradicted or reversed either higher up the chain, or in a different part of the organization. I don't know if this is better or worse than average at Mozilla, but it's certainly present to at least some extent in any company of (almost) any size.
- Osmose 12y ago
  > I don't know if this is better or worse than average at Mozilla, It's less about contradiction (which implies a final decision was made and then reversed) and more about being painfully open. Other companies may also have lots of instances where there's internal disagreement on things, but when your standard form of communication is mailing lists, IRC, and blog posts, it's a lot harder to maintain the façade of a unified mind.
  - mantrax5 12y ago
    You're exactly right. This would be like a person who is unable to lead internal dialog, and everything they think, they say out loud.
- mantrax5 12y ago
  A well run company acts as one person. That's what a brand means. For good or bad, in the mind of people companies are allocated as a "person". We give personal characteristics to brands, so we value companies that act predictably, have certain well-known values and are consistent with their own values. It's the utmost responsibility even if your CEO changes every month, that the next CEO ensure continuity in spirit and operation of a company. After all, sure, companies don't do things, people do. But also people don't do things, brain cells do things. When a person is acting erratic and inconsistent, you don't talk about their internal brain cell conflicts, you see a problem at the person level. Same way erratically behaving brands & companies will be written off, because they don't stand for anything and have no reliable characteristics. Companies that act inconsistently are said to have "left hand doesn't know what right hand does" problem. It's not a feature, it's a bug. It's no coincidence the analogy is to that with the mind of a single person. You may be collection of brain parts, but for proper operations it's crucial you operate self-consistently. Companies are no different.
azakai 12y ago
> Do you people suffer split personality or something? There are downsides to doing design and development in the open, sometimes looking that way is one of them. But the benefits are worth it.
danso 12y ago
> "That's not who we are at Mozilla". That's Mozilla talking about a Mozilla decision. Do you people suffer split personality or something? Wow, this here is a textbook case of out-of-context quoting...even in a post that takes 30 seconds to read. Here's the context that the parent comment has completely failed to read: > A lot of our community found the language hard to decipher, and worried that we were going to turn Firefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit. > > That’s not going to happen. That’s not who we are at Mozilla. "That's not going to happen. That’s not who we are at Mozilla" - refers to the perceived fear that: "we were going to turn Firefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit". - NOT to an actual decision/policy that the Mozilla team is ostensibly standing behind. I don't necessarily disagree with the rest of your rant, but the fact that you so terribly misquoted the OP doesn't lend your argument much credence.
- randallsquared 12y ago
  The grandparent comment was quietly asserting that the "perceived fear" was actually Mozilla's plan, and that they reversed course. I must admit, while I'd never really thought about Mozilla as an organization much before, the last month or two has prompted some thought about it, and this sort of "We're doing A. <time passes> No, wait, there's a perceived fear that we'll do A, but that's not who we are; we're doing B." seems like a good model of what they're doing lately. This saddens me, since I mostly use Firefox these days. :/
  - jasonlotito 12y ago
    > The grandparent comment was quietly asserting that the "perceived fear" was actually Mozilla's plan, and that they reversed course. Except nothing in the original announcement came close to the perceived fear. Essentially, people were extrapolating in such a way that this[0] comes to mine. [0] http://xkcd.com/605/ http://xkcd.com/605/

daleharvey 12y ago

I think this is both good and bad I love the fact that at Mozilla we listen to community input and make decisions that we feel are in the best interests of the user, I dont feel like I work at a company at Mozilla, I feel like I work with a community. But at the same time, a lot of the broader community are (rightly) cynical and when something like this is proposed it causes a minor uproar, Its also hard to filter out what is the vocal minority between a genuine concern, I have no doubt that it would have been implemented in a responsible way that benefited everyone involved, so I think this may be a bit of a missed opportunity, but onwards and upwards.

Osmose 12y ago

This article is an interpretation of https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2014/05/09/new-tab-experiments/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2014/05/09/new-tab-e... and I'm not sure it's the correct interpretation. My personal opinion (which might be wrong!) is that jonnath is trying to reassure people that 'Directory Tiles' is not about slapping random ads on the newtab page, and is not going to just ride the trains to release. They're going to stew in the Nightly channel for a while while we iterate on them and figure out how to make them useful to users. What I don't see is an assertion that the final feature won't involve some form of revenue. There's been no final declaration, but my understanding was that the suggested system involved choosing sites that are useful to our users, and then going to those sites and discussing payment for the placement, rather than letting sites come and pay us to be put on the page. This is very similar to what we do with the search box: we choose Google as the default because we think they're the best default for the users, not because they got to us first or paid us the most[1]. If you want more details about the implementation that's going to land on Nightly, check out the tracker bug for the feature and the dependent bugs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=973273 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=973273 (And remember kids, Bugzilla is for input on the implementation, discussion about the feature itself goes on a mailing list like firefox-dev[2]). [1]: Granted, if we choose Google and Google said "Hah, no money for you" then we'd probably go to another provider because we have employees to pay, but this becomes a more important distinction if, say, Bing wanted to pay us more than Google. [2]: https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/firefox-dev Disclaimer: I'm a webdev for Mozilla, and can't speak for the people actually working on Directory Tiles, only as someone who knows how to navigate Mozilla's public information.

anon1385 12y ago
>This is very similar to what we do with the search box: we choose Google as the default because we think they're the best default for the users, not because they got to us first or paid us the most Is there a public record of this discussion? I'm kind of curious if anybody brought up the idea that not having your searches tracked by an ad network would be best for the users. Unfortunately that leads to the conclusion that the default search should be DDG (or similar) and I doubt they could afford to pay you enough to keep Mozilla running. Call me cynical but I'm not sure I believe that anybody in the room was going to take that suggestion seriously when it meant their paycheque was on the line. I can accept the argument that Google is a better search engine right now so the tracking is 'worth it' for most users (although that does seem to conflict heavily with Principle 4 of the Mozilla Manifesto: Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional). What happens if DGG catches up enough to be functionally equivalent for most people? Do Mozilla engineers collectively fall on their swords and lose their jobs to improve the privacy of the internet for most users? Or do we have to engage in 'lesser of two evils' style mental gymnastics about the world being better if Firefox is well funded?

huhtenberg 12y ago

> A lot of our community found the language hard to decipher There is something rotten in the Mozilla stewardship. First they come with an idea that clearly goes against their users best interests. Then they actively try to disguise it and sell it as something that people really truly want, but are just dumb enough not to realize and appreciate. They still get an earful. And now they don't have chops to simply say that the idea was bad and it was written off. Instead there's this masterpiece of weasel wording that effectively puts blame on the users for killing a perfectly good idea. What the f#ck.

Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago
Their plan seemed fine to me. In fact, it was for the benefit of their users - everyone wins if Mozilla is funded and decoupled from Google. The ads were unintrusive, and made sense in context. It was just populating something that was replaced over time with info from your own browsing habits.
- huhtenberg 12y ago
  It's not the idea to put the ads in. It's the fake pretense of doing that for the sake of users. Just re-read the original announcement [0]. It is so disingenuous, it hurts. Then see the line I quoted above. It got the exact same problem - it's disingenuous. The issues with the announcement were not with the language. [0] https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publisher-transformation-with-users-at-the-center/ https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publish...
  - kolme 12y ago
    They can be really useful to new users with no or little experience. From what I've seen, when people use the web for the first times, they "don't know where to go". They don't have surfing habits yet and they're completely overwhelmed by so much to choose from. If you offer people a handful of useful/informative/fun sites, it'll be much easier for them to pick something and get going. If this is implemented carefully (and I think Mozilla is putting a lot of though into it) this could really be a win-win-win situation for Mozilla, the users and the advertisers. Also note that chances are that you never see those ads because Firefox will continue showing you the sites you visit often.

tom_jones 12y ago

I thought this would be about the new mobile version, which unlike the prior "upgrade" is actually an upgrade. The prior mobile version ruined what was a great program. Hopefully that they're moving in the right direction with mobile will mean the desktop version will improve too.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

olegp 12y ago

Since we are on the topic of experimenting with the FF new tab page, it would be great to get the feedback of the HN community on this add-on that we've been working on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/starthq/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/starthq/ StartHQ replaces the new tab page with one that you can fully customize, giving you quick access to commonly used functionality using "deep links", as well as the ability to search inside your cloud services, like Greplin did back in the day. We also have an API so you can add search support to the services we don't support or internal apps used within your organization. More info here: https://starthq.com/features https://starthq.com/features

chmod775 12y ago
I think you guys sent me some mail when you added Volafile. It seemed very impersonal and automated to me, which is likely what you're doing. The other reason I pretty much ignored it was that the site didn't really appear 'curated' to me, just filled with stuff a crawler would've found out about me. Off the top of the head I have three ideas that might help: - Maybe make it possible for users (not webmasters) to edit information about pages or at least let them leave some feedback. - Send personalized mails to webmasters, to give them some incentive to actually help you pad the little information you have about their sites. Or even better let me just reply to your mail with a short description of my site and directly put that on Volafile's/Whatever's profile. That would basically take away all of the friction I'd have to endure while 'claiming' my profile. Replying to a mail isn't hard and you could be pretty sure it belongs to the rightful owner. - Just pull some reviews off other sites, like Google does with reviews for restaurants (only the first few lines with a link to full review) Use these suggestions however you like, they're just my few cents but they might help to pad the little content you have on each page with something more useful to the user. Currently stuff like this: https://starthq.com/apps/volafile-io https://starthq.com/apps/volafile-io looks empty and cheap to me, like something created by a machine. Not many people will be intent to discover more stuff on your page if the information they'll get is so little with each click. Even I, who wanted to discover 'alternatives' to my own service got bored after a few clicks. I didn't feel like I was finding out anything useful about the suggested alternatives and related services. Plus you don't seem to refresh the 'stars' very often. Volafile doesn't have a lot WoT ratings, but they don't seem to warrant 1 star. Why don't you let your users rate service by clicking on the stars? It works well for most other online 'market places'. I actually thought the stars would be clickable at first. Looking at some other services I don't think the 'stars' they have make sense at all. Most have 1 star throughout the bank and others have 4 times 1 star and one 5 star 'gauge'. They look pretty random and only confuse. Maybe you should try to work out better conditions on when to display them. Services with not enough data points available seem to get 1 star by default, maybe just gray them all out? Okay that's all I noticed. Maybe you should take my opinions with a grain of salt as I'm not really your average user, but I know how valuable feedback can be to small websites (running one myself, unsurprisingly) Edit: I can't seem to claim Volafile's profile. Just takes me to some launcher.

doe88 12y ago

That obtuse language still scares me, I think it says a lot that the word ads is not written a single time in this blog post and he seems to use the word logos instead.

ambrop7 12y ago

Why not spend all that time that goes into making changes to the UI on actual functionality, like multi-process, sandbox, faster WebGL?

vfclists 12y ago
Doesn't that work need to be funded somehow?

lucb1e 12y ago

> New Tab Experiments Hey, that's not the title I upvoted

melloclello 12y ago

I like my new tab to be empty. Because it's a new tab.

blueskin_ 12y ago

What I find bad is this: "particularly for fresh installs of Firefox, where we don’t yet have any recommendations to make from your history" Does this mean they are going to be scraping people's history to find 'suggestions'? If so, time for me to move to pale moon.